Al-Muhajabah's Movable Type Tips

RDF versions of your blog entries

I seem to be on an XML kick lately, lol. The latest thing I've been playing around with is semantic weblog posts. This involves creating an RDF version of your blog entries to support the Semantic Web. Basically, it involves creating an alternate format of the entry that presents the data in a structured way that is meaningful to computers, similar to RSS feeds. An example of how this can be useful is Piggy Bank, a Firefox extension that allows you to view RDF data in a nice format in your browser and do things with it. I started with the template at HubLog, but then decided to modify it based on an article about adding more metadata with Movable Type. I made a few tweaks because of an issue with dynamically-generated pages in MT 2.661. Because I'm using MT 2.661, I used this method for dynamically generating the RDF files. The template is at "rdf" here. Check out the finished product. To get the full effect, you would need to be using Piggy Bank in Firefox (note: what you would need to do is go to the regular entry page in Firefox and click the data coin icon in the status bar. For me, the data from the RDF file is on page 4). Later: I made a few more modifications after looking up the RSS 1.0 specs, especially the modules. Check the template file for the latest.

RSS feeds for tags

So you've got your blog set up with tags. A neat way to expand this is to offer RSS feeds for each of your tags. Visitors can subscribe to these feeds and be updated when any new entries are posted that are tagged with that particular keyword/subject. You'll need to make another alternate search template. My template for an RSS 1.0 feed is at "Keyword RSS Template" here. Link to it in your templates with <$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>?Template=rss&IncludeBlogs=<$MTBlogID$>&SearchField=keywords
&search=<$MTSearchString$> where "rss" represents the name of your template in mt.cfg (for some reason, I found that putting the items in the URL in a different order produced a feed that didn't display properly as RSS in the browser; however, this order works). I link to it on each tag's page. If you're linking to it elsewhere, replace <$MTSearchString$> with the template tag that you use to call the particular keyword tag. I also created an Index of Tag Feeds to list all the available feeds. I did this by hacking the code for the tag cloud page; this requires PHP. I'm not sure why there's a blank tag at the beginning or why the feed for it is empty. I'll have to look into that further.

allow people to import lists of links from your blog

Suppose that you wanted to display a list of links to all the entries in Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs. Given that there are well over 3000 entries, you would probably not actually want to do this. But suppose that you did. I've created a file that allows you to do this: OPML List of Entries. To create this, I modified template code from Niall Kennedy. I removed my email address from the template. I also had to add the title attribute after testing with TypePad (see below) to get it to play well there. You can remove the MTOtherBlog tags since that's a quirk of my own installation with multiple blogs. To see my code, scroll down to "OPML List of Entries" here. So, how do you display this? If you're using Movable Type, install the Outliner plugin. The following code works to create a list of links from the OPML file: <MTOutliner opmllink="http://www.muhajabah.com/islamicblog/index.opml"> <MTOutlinerItems> <p><a href="<$MTOutlinerItemHTML$>"><$MTOutlinerItemText$></a></p> </MTOutlinerItems> </MTOutliner> With TypePad, you can import the OPML file into a TypeList. I had to add the redundant title attribute to each item to get it to import the title of each entry, otherwise it came in blank. That wasn't so difficult after all, was it? If you use Outliner, every time that you rebuild the template with the Outliner code, it will pull the latest list of entries from the OPML feed. However, if you import the OPML into a TypeList, it will not update automatically, you'll just get what is in the feed at the time that you do the import. Now that I've figured out how to do this and what it can be used for, I'll look into adding some other OPML feeds for Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs, ones that are hopefully more useful than a list of links to more than 3000 entries. Later: A list of OPML feeds I have created is available at the Index of Feeds.